This invention relates to controlled, patterned removal of solid state materials and further relates to control of chemical reactions carried out on solid state materials.
Modern solid state microfabrication technologies have evolved to encompass the production of microstructures and nanostructures for both electronic and microelectromechanical (MEMS) systems. Exotic substrate and component materials are increasingly employed in complicated three-dimensional system arrangements. Historically and conventionally, the building blocks of microfabricated system componentry have been produced by imparting patterns to solid state structures and by imposing selective chemical processes, such as impurity doping, material removal, and material growth, on solid state materials. The term “solid state” is here used to refer to non-biological materials generally.
In the production of both electronic and MEMS systems, nanometric feature control of solid state structures is increasingly becoming a microfabrication concern. In addition, selective chemical processing of unconventional solid state materials and structures, often arranged in intricate configurations, is increasingly becoming a microfabrication challenge. There have been established a wide range of microfabrication techniques for producing and controlling structural dimensions and chemical reactions on solid state materials. For example, high resolution lithographic techniques and high-precision additive and subtractive material processing techniques have been proposed to enable small-scale feature fabrication. But in the fabrication of many micro- and nano-regime systems, in which structural feature dimensions of a few nanometers can be of importance and in which exotic materials and intricate structural configurations are often employed, conventional techniques often cannot form the requisite nano-scale features reproducibly or without harming system materials, and often cannot provide selective chemical processing of the materials predictably or without harming system materials. As a result, volume manufacture of many systems that include microscale or nanometric feature dimensions and/or unconventional materials and configurations is not practical or economical.